Comments on Below Fifth Avenue

I finished reading this episode the other day. Of cource, the audio is not known to exist in circulation and quite honestly, reading this particular episode left me wanting. If Cooper were around writing it today, I'd wonder if he were on drugs!

It really was not one of his better efforts and I almost wonder if it was written after a brief angry encounter with some bad holes in the road.

It reminds me a lot of "Presto Change-O", and even maybe "Little Fellow". I'd say they all run the magic point into the ground (litterally, in the case of "Below Fifth Avenue" ) with a bit of repetition, and the humor doesn't play out as well as it could. I still enjoy them even though they're not my favoites, but they're experiments which didn't end up quite right. "Dark Gray Magic" is in my opinion the perfect example of what that type of story can be, when it works out right... and that one is one of my favorites.

Yeah, Cooper does have a tendency to spread the whimsy on too thick sometimes. The episodes Paul mentions suffer from that to one extent or another. Maybe after doing "In the House Where I Was Born" the week before, Cooper felt obligated to do a lighter comedy episode and went a little overboard.

Also, I think that the more comic episodes benefit tremendously from Chappell's and the other actors' performances. When I was doing the transcript of "The Pathetic Fallacy," for example, I was struck at how much the acting brought the dialogue to life: it seemed to play a lot better than it read. I suspect "Below Fifth Avenue" is one of those episodes that plays better than it reads. I can sort of imagine Chappell using a variation of his persnickety "John J. Catherine" voice for the role. Maybe if Mark Mantucci's cloak-and-dagger mission retrieves the evidence, we'll find out.

Which reminds me -- did anyone ever get hold of a recording of that "One Hundred Thousand Diameters" recreation from a few months ago?

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